


Independent Variables

by ArdeaWrites



Series: Resonant Crowbar [4]
Category: Half-Life
Genre: Alyx is building things, Barney is taking care of his people, Freeman doesn't do "coworkers" very well, Gen, Gordon is trying, Mute Gordon Freeman, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Short Chapters, and Alyx has no time for "hero worship", collection of one-shots loosely related and somewhat in order, emotional support D0G, half life 2 - Freeform, leaning on the 4th wall, mute character, not sorry, this became a bunch of short one-shots, two very individual people learning to respect one another, utterly gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23449366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: Chapter 1: Gordon Freeman is an excellent physicist but human interaction, and the mutual respect it demands, is really not his gift.Chapter 2: Alyx has learned to build her own future and thrive despite the rubble of civilization, but she's got no time for her father's favorite ghost.Chapter 3: Alyx and Barney have a chat about their newest asset, and Alyx considers risk and maintenance. Set in HL2 chapter 5.Chapter 4: The battle for City 17 isn't easy on anyone. Rating bumped up for this chapter.Chapter 5: City 17 isn't won yet and progress is hard to measure. Luckily, there's a D0G.Chapter 6: Barney goes to find Freeman on the eve of the final push, and realizes he's been overlooking things.Chapter 7: A Terrible Idea for curing Freeman's reflex problem.Chapter 8: Homesick in White ForestApparently there will be more of these. This is set in the same continuity as Physics of the Crowbar.No reference to ships, but not hostile to them either. Just... good luck figuring that out with this version of Freeman. Updating tags as content is added.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Alyx Vance, Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman, Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance
Series: Resonant Crowbar [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855192
Comments: 33
Kudos: 134





	1. Chapter 1

She was still so young.  
  
He read it in her eyes, in her face, how her hands held the gun. She moved through the hallways with a cautious confidence; she knew her strength, her reflexes. She was comfortable here on earth-at-war. An urban coyote, small and bold.  
  
She wasn’t old enough to remember the day the world ended. She hadn’t had her identity wrung from her and been left alone in alien darkness to stitch herself back together. It would come. With age, with loss, it would come.  
  
He hoped for her sake it would be the bullets and blood wrung out, and her alien darkness be the shock of peace. What was her identity under the bright scavenger who so casually slid past the black-armored wolves? Who would she be without the fighting edge and scent of gun smoke?  
  
He wanted to know.  
  
He shouldn’t want to know.  
  
He couldn’t afford to want to know. She was a weakness, a distraction, a little piece of rogue machinery that didn’t reliably accept his control. He couldn’t bound her with parameters or predict her oscillating attention. He had to trust her, and that meant he had to ignore her presence too close to him, in his blind spot and at his back, and _that_ meant accepting seeing her dead and knowing he could walk away. The body didn’t like it.  
  
Had he lost comrades, other “assets” and “investments” of the Colleague’s, in the interval? His conscious mind didn’t remember names or faces, but the twinge in his chest suggested he had.  
  
His gloved hands clenched and relaxed. Something in that darkness called out to him. He’d been someone else’s machinery there. A weapon, an intelligent blunt object, and a part of him had loved it. He wasn’t sure what to think about that revelation, as he watched the woman advance down the hall in front of him. Her gun went everywhere her eyes went, until the floor was cleared; then they turned to him, gun pointing to the floor, her mouth white with teeth. “We’re good here. We can get to the roof of the next building through the balcony. Come on!”  
  
Little coyote, laughing at the wolves.  
  
He’d watched them from Black Mesa’s outer walls. They’d trot up and down the effluent pipes, looking for scraps and handouts, eating the rabbits that fed on the sewage-watered grasses. The security guards took potshots at them, but they almost never hit; the animals were intelligent enough to haunt the dawn and dusk hours, when distance was hardest to judge, and they knew the shape of a gun. Ears flattened, tail bushed, they’d dart out of sight as soon as one was raised. But five minutes later they were back, yapping and singing under the halogen flood lights.  
  
Equality did not come easily to Freeman. It was bundled with trust and mutual respect and required things like prolonged contact, healthy communication, frequent interaction and human interest. Those were not part of his toolkit. He had run through his share of interns, new hires, post-grads and the like, and he’d been part of a chain of egos loosely bundled into a “project team” or jockeying for position on paper authorship, but he’d never had a partner.  
  
She didn’t fit into his prior experience. He couldn’t give her the casually cold treatment he gave the interns Black Mesa had foisted onto him to cut costs, or the direct and sometimes brutal cold-water dunking into laboratory life he reserved for the new-hires in their month-long resonance research trial. And he respected her ability to clear a room or kill a soldier, but he wasn’t going to defer to her in battle.  
  
He had vague memories of meeting a child in the labs. He’d thought it a terrible idea to bring a kid into so dangerous a workplace, or quite frankly to conceive one at all when they worked around carcinogenic and mutagenic substances on a daily basis. Black Mesa gave lucrative benefits to the male employees who produced children, provided their children were educated in the company daycare. Some kind of IQ experimentation going on there, no doubt, but they strongly discouraged their female scientists from becoming pregnant, as it would result in lost work time and perceived lower productivity.  
  
Freeman's life plans had never included partnership, of the professional or the social kind.  
  
But then neither had his plans included the slaughter of Black Mesa or living for days in a HEV or not recognizing his own body under the masses of speed-grown scar tissue or knowing the taste and scent of alien blood.  
  
Or walking distant worlds, seeing distant moons, breathing air not meant for human lungs.  
  
He'd survived all that and more; he could learn to cooperate with this fellow human. Trust her skill and bullets, trust the work of her hands to shield his skin. Maybe it was time to stop fighting alone.  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Learning curves go both ways. When the past shows up in person, Alyx isn't impressed; she's too busy building a future.

She’d been hearing about Freeman from her father and the handful of Black Mesa survivors her entire life. The Black Mesa survivors had become family, weathering the worst of Earth’s downfall and the fracture of humanity. She’d grown from being a protected child to being the protector and caregiver for the aging scientists, come of age amid their failed experiments. Seen them pound on the walls of reality and demand matter move, time shift, energy appear.

The previous generation looked backwards at the world they’d lost but she looked forwards to the world she would create. She’d built the miracle that was D0G around herself, growing it bolt by bolt and code by code until the artificial animal displayed a level of coordination and intelligence that would have revolutionized robotics on a pre-Combine world.

(They said how sorry they were for her suffering the suppression field but she didn’t miss what she’d never wanted. She created life with precision and intent, not with messy unreliable genetics.)

The notion of Freeman, in abstract, was part of their past, not her future. She’d mentally shoved it aside as a fragment of their mania, ignoring even her own father’s tales of his heroism. Why worship a ghost, _that_ ghost, why be held back by the anticipation of a savior twenty years too late? When their stories and hopes went too far she’d go work on D0G, perfecting another branch of behavioral learning or wiring in additional memory or tuning his hydraulics for faster response time. This “Freeman” hadn’t rescued _her._ She’d done that herself, every single day of her life.

Actually seeing the man, watching him run and be hunted and fall, realizing in a split second all the myths were so horribly false…She’d been disappointed in him for letting her father down. For betraying twenty years of misplaced hope. And then she’d hauled him out of the alley and gotten his blood on her clothing (truncheons did nasty things to unprotected arms and hands) and had realized her own oversight.

He was human. Plain old normal human like her. Hungry, disoriented, injured. Intelligent, yes, good at living through hell, but compared to her family he was just a very durable average.

They stuffed him in the HEV (her precious HEV) and told her to keep him safe. Safe. _Safe._ She had enough to do keeping her father and the other scientists safe. Let Barney, the closest thing they had to a front-lines soldier, babysit the newest scientific disaster. Or give him to the Vorts, who worshiped the ground on which he walked. How was she supposed to keep him safe? He didn’t seem interested in self-preservation and he didn’t take any orders from her.

She had to watch him in action, see him emerge from Ravenholm, (she hadn’t wanted to send him there, tempting as it was to put the myth through its paces, and she’d genuinely had no other option,) see him plot his course through the city, and experience the Combine’s sudden single-minded leap into action against him before she understood.

It wasn’t intentional on his part. He wasn’t charismatic. He didn’t exactly endear himself to the people around him. But he had a magnetic sort of forward momentum that dragged everyone else along, got a ball rolling that had sat at rest under Combine rule. And he didn’t seem at all interested in the actual business of power and leadership. It was just very hard to stay on the sidelines when a guy in neon orange armor plowed through a pack of parasites in a glorified go-cart. He made other people say _let’s go fight too._

He spoke with his face, with his chin and elbows and whole body. People stepped back or forward, moved as he willed them, without realizing they were responding to the set of his shoulders. He could gather a group of survivors, part them up and distribute them across what cover they had, set a trap, press an attack, without a word. _Could give orders with an eyebrow_ , a medic said once, and she knew it was true.

Everyone learned to watch him. He looked them in the eye instead of calling them by name. He led with his whole self, armored body imposed between them and the unknown shadows, not with distant orders on a radio.

She started watching him too. Started letting herself respond to his silent cues and subtle signals.

Maybe there was something to her father’s stories. One man wouldn’t have turned the tide of the six-hour war, but the planet might have been freed a few decades sooner if he hadn’t vanished on Xen, she thought.

But then she’d have been a child, not an adult and comrade in arms. A little part of her was glad she was meeting the symbol of the continent’s fighting will this way, shotgun in hand, his assigned bodyguard and guide through the Combine madness. They were equals; her twenty years of survival under Combine rule weighed against his inhuman ability to calculate his way through a battlefield and utter lack of fear.

He glanced at her, made that moment of connection. He jerked his chin sharply up and left, then stepped around the corner he’d been sheltering behind, drawing enemy fire as she darted from rubble to ruined wall and flanked the distracted soldiers. He was trusting the armor she’d built to hold under their bullets, trusting her to gun them down before they did irreparable damage, trusting his life to her willing partnership.

She liked that trust. Liked it a lot.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alyx and Calhoun have a chat about the newest member of the Resistance.

“You think it’s him?”

Barney crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her but his gaze was distant through the scratchy video feed. His brows were lowered in thought. “Yes,” he said. “I’d stake my life on it. I have, and a lot of other people’s lives too.”

“Including my father.” She didn’t mean to sound harsh but her tone was honest. She didn’t know Freeman from a CP tinhat and so far all he’d done was bash his way through an underground railroad five years in the making. He’d played nice with D0G but that didn’t mean she trusted him yet, or wanted him anywhere near her family.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Barney sounded tired. “There is risk.”

Alyx held the small screen close and kept her voice low. She was hunkered behind a stack of crates at the end of a storage bunker. She felt a little ridiculous but knew this conversation wouldn’t go over well in earshot of any of the other Black Mesa Survivors or older Resistance.

“But you’re sure? You remember him?” she asked. She didn’t mean to sound like an interrogator but… twenty years, and the guy just walks in one day? It seemed too simple, and when things were simple they usually went wrong. She itched all over with uneasy anticipation.

Barney shifted his shoulders on the ribbed steel wall behind him on her screen. “I didn’t know him well. I’d like to think we were friends but he’s not an easy man to be friends with, Alyx. We were the same age, sure, back then, but he wasn’t any warmer then than he is now. Didn’t talk, didn’t ask for anything, didn’t give anything. For four months, I spent two hours every day with him on a tram, just the two of us, and he’d just… sit there like a mannequin or fall asleep. I even learned swear words in sign language to see if I could get a smile out of him. In hindsight I probably drove him up the wall, and am probably lucky he didn’t snap and toss my ass off the tram, but you know, back then I prided myself in having a little social charm,” he made a gesture for exactly how tiny, “just a _little_ , and nothing.”

“He’s always been solitary.”

Barney nodded. “Very. And that’s why I think it’s still him. If he was a Combine plant, they’d never have gotten _this_ right,” he said, making an approximation of Freeman’s thin-lipped peering gaze. Freeman probably made that face whenever he was solving some mental problem but it made him look like a skinny judgmental owl. He’d made that face a lot at D0G and the gravity gun.

Alyx smiled despite herself. “I’m sorry for questioning him, but the others just let him in so fast. You know? We just got done outside and he’s up with my father and Mossman now, in and out of the labs. They’re showing him everything. If the Combine wanted us gone, this would be the best plan.”

“Dress up a sleeper agent and waltz them in as the lost savior? Yeah, I get it. And I’m glad you’re concerned. Means we trained you right.” He smiled at her, a thin, tired, experienced smile. He hadn’t wanted to train her to fight and kill. Had wanted to preserve the one beacon of childish innocence and laughter in their midst. But he had, and at eight years old she’d saved her own life shooting parasites with the hand gun he’d given her.

But Freeman still had her on edge. She’d rescued him, brought him in, made him play with D0G. A little humanity test. Most humans would respond favorably to anything remotely alive and friendly, from kinship networks on down to robotic vacuum cleaners. The Combine tended to be less tolerant. He’d passed that test, and a few other little ones of her own devising, but he still felt so _cold._ And if something went wrong, if he snapped or hurt someone, she’d never forgive herself for being the vector of his arrival.

“Do we know where he was yet?” she asked. “I thought he never came back from Xen.”

“I’ve been wondering that too. A lot of weird stuff was going on, started long before the Cascade. It’s, ah, not part of the stories the scientists like to tell. Let’s just say the revelation that we aren’t alone in the universe, or that there’s more than one universe, or that time and space are a little… fluid?” He wobbled his hand back and forth. “Not really a surprise.” He shrugged. “We watched the security footage. Buddy of mine figured it might be useful in proving the military murdered the staff, so he uploaded the whole thing to the satellite server when they did the uplink. We pulled it after the place blew to see if there was any chance he’d made it back through a portal. No luck there, but we did get three days of footage of that man wiping the floor with the US Marines, and we got video of some real weird characters around the edges. No one talks about it much anymore because…” he waved vaguely, the universal gesture for _everything in the last twenty years in general,_ “but there wasn’t just us and them. There was some other faction involved. Not Combine. I don’t know who they were or what they wanted, but they were following him.”

“You think they took him?”

“It’s starting to seem likely. My best guess was that he’d gotten trapped on the other side. And my other best guess was someone’d finally aimed for his head,” he said. He made a bleak sound. “But if he’s here, someone brought him home. Maybe twenty years is how long it takes to hitchhike from Xen to Earth.”

“Dad says he hasn’t aged.”

Barney shook his head. “He’s aged, Alyx. That man was never young, but he’s aged. Combine wouldn’t have gotten that right either, if he were a clone or a sleeper, I think. I don’t think they know anything about what war does to a man’s eyes. Black Mesa put a different kind of year on him. On all of us.” He opened one calloused hand and regarded his palm, as if remembering all the things that hand had done.

_He’s been to Xen too,_ Alyx thought. He never talked about it, so it was easy to forget he’d seen the same alien sky as Freeman.

“I don’t think he’s been any better off than the rest of us,” Barney said. “May be a while before we crack that shell off him, but he’s human and he bleeds, even if he doesn’t admit it. Keep an eye on him.”

“I am.”

“I know. He’s not an enemy but he’s wound tighter now than he was then and if he snaps none of us can stop him.”

Barney’s words allayed one set of fears but brought up another. She’d seen men and women lose themselves before, go into some deep flashback or just… give up. Best case scenario they went out in a private little fire but sometimes they took others with them. She hated to think what the man in her armor could do, if the combined US Military and Xen heavy troops together hadn’t even slowed him down, if he forgot who was friend and who was foe. Best keep him pointed at the Combine and stay behind his angle of fire.

She’d been there when people broke. She’d been there for her father, on long nights after failure on top of failure, been there with Barney when the death list grew uncountably long. She’d held the hands of grown men as they lost all emotional control, sent D0G to retrieve medics who wouldn’t stop trying to save the dead, dragged the husks of parasitized friends into pyres for burning. She thanked whatever power there still was in the universe she’d never had to kill a friend who snapped violently, but others had. She’d not yet reached that point of breakdown herself and wondered when she would, what would send her over the edge and who would be there to pick up her pieces.

Freeman _would_ break. Barney’s words confirmed it and she trusted his assessment. He’d been a soldier, strategist and double-agent, he knew their enemy and their own people better than anyone else in the Resistance.

But would Freeman implode messily into an emotional meltdown or violently into bloodshed, and take with him Earth’s last gasp for freedom?

“So what would you do?” She asked, her voice a mix of concern and dry humor. Enough with the dire predictions. “How would you crack that shell?”

Barney smirked. “Take his crowbar away. But honestly? I don’t think we can afford to. We need him on his edge right now, as long as he can last. When this is over, get him plastered and sign him up for group therapy.”

She let herself smile back at Barney’s wry tone. “Is that what you wanted to do with him? Get him drunk and fix him?”

Barney made a gesture that she suspected was one of those sign language swear words he’d mentioned. “Black Mesa, they had a hundred guys like him. Cold, alone, brilliant, was like they’d traded emotional intelligence to become a sociopathic Einstein. But he walked in that way. I guess I wanted to know what made him tick, what’d made him so brilliant but so—”

“So weird?”

“Yeah, you know. I bet you’d like to take a crack at his response coding yourself or whatever it is you write for D0G.”

Well, yeah, he was right about that. She’d wondered if she pried open the suit would she find human skin and bone or an automaton running on machine learning and lithium. He’d bled when the CPs beat him to a pulp in the alley, but since then he’d showed about as much human weakness as a cinderblock wall.

“But yeah. I thought maybe if I can get this guy to smile, make a connection here, I’ll have gotten something done with my day. He didn’t look like anyone had ever made the effort before.”

“Life back then was really that boring?”

“You have no idea.”

“And you never succeeded? Not even once?”

“Didn’t twitch a hair on that goatee. But you know, by the end of that shift rotation, he’d sleep the whole tram ride. I’d start talking, just launch right in to some inane nonsense I’d made up on shift, and it’d knock him right out. I guess that’s an accomplishment in and of itself. Never had such an inattentive audience before. I wanted to be offended, but looking back on it, guy wound that tight was able to relax enough to nap, maybe that was worth all the trouble.”

Alyx considered his words. Every night she worked on D0G, assessing hydraulic pressure, keeping his joints in condition, checking his code for errors. D0G was too strong and too valuable to risk on poor lubrication or a coding glitch. Much like this Freeman, in that way. She’d have to find out what constituted “oiling the joints and defragging the memory” for their newest asset. Maybe get Barney to talk him to sleep some more. Self-repair routines only went so far for machines and humans both; if he’d let them help with maintenance, perhaps they could forestall that inevitable implosion until after they’d freed their species.

She didn’t want more work. She didn’t want another living time bomb to watch tick down. But cracking his armor would be worth it if it meant a few fewer dead friends.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The four-man squad was a fun game mechanic but man did they have some interesting timing.  
> Set during the City 17 battle of HL2:Ch 10; expanding that chapter into days of urban combat as the Uprising gets itself together and on track.

He had the little band of rebels laid out like a tool kit. _This_ one laid cover fire, _that_ one was good with a rifle, _those two_ were the pincer attack, sent to flank their enemies or pour bullets into CP rears should Freeman’s position be rushed. The CPs were the material sent for diagnostics. Test, draw out, analyze. Response time and pattern. Rate of fire, size of clip. Count heads, little round black helmets. They came in groups of four, fifty shots to a clip. Fast-firing but there was a delay in reload. Knock off two, wait for reload, then break cover and take the last two. They didn’t conserve ammunition like the rebels did. They didn’t conserve bodies either.

Freeman couldn’t take a squad alone, but he could survive the three rounds a CP would shoot before he closed on their position and put a shotgun shell through those optics.

He did not know his soldiers’ names.

He was never going to know their names. Names were irrelevant data. He wasn't going to sign their names at them to make them pay attention.

It was like working with interns all over again, in some ways worse than Black Mesa; these ones wanted to fight. They had all the courage and skill Black Mesa security had lacked, but they also had a degree of valiance that was getting them killed.

He almost preferred them hunkered under a table or behind a dumpster to breaking cover against his signals or charging across his line of fire. Alyx's armor was tough, much less brittle than the old HEV, so while each hit of a CP round transferred force in increasingly painful ways they weren't punching through him the way they did fabric-covered flesh.

And when he felt the tap and sting of small-arms fire on his back he knew it was friendly.

He shot the last CP and whirled on the young rebel behind him. He didn't signal, he just ripped the hand gun away from the man and knocked him to the ground. He shucked the clip and tossed both it and the empty gun to the older woman on his right; she'd stayed down, taking pot shots without risking her head and she'd managed to not hit him.

The rebel made monosyllable noises of protest and apology while scrambling backwards on palms and heels. Freeman drove him three steps, then jerked his chin sharply in the direction they'd come. His back smarted from the two shots. One was low, had caught him on the left side under his arm but the other was higher, right side, near the spine, far too near the unprotected back of his head.

The rebel rolled over and got up. He dusted his hands off and shook out his jacket. He was angry, embarrassed, defensive. He shouted something and made a move to grab Freeman's gun.

Freeman knocked him down again, one controlled palm to the boy's chest. He pointed back the way they'd come.

Then he turned away. Job to do, job to keep doing. The kid would live. The road behind them was clear.

Kid. Freeman felt old. The rebel was probably close to his chronological age, had grown up on the battlefield. The cavalier attitude was born of manic desperation, lifelong warfare becoming personal identity.

But he had no time for posturing. They either followed his directions or they died of CP bullets. Or, sometimes, his own.

He'd killed two in the city-wide battle, trigger pulled before he registered their movement into his line of fire.

\--

The rebels mourned their own in their own way; no dog tags, no identifiers for the bodies, just the list of names checked at the door. Either you came back or you didn't, and you were dead until you were home.

Becoming Combine didn't count as being alive.

He'd been dead. He'd been dead and declared a saint and prayed to in absentia. The myth rode him heavily, as he navigated the ruins of his world and tried to keep the scattered soldiers alive. It interfered with cold reality and made the wet bodies do foolish things in his name. They were braver, bolder than they should have been. They thought they could be like him by proximity, share in that perceived immortality.

They didn't know how little of the flesh in the HEV was human.

Twenty years. Twice over his body had replaced itself, stasis or no. He felt it, deep in the muscle and bone. Things had changed, been rewritten, been refined. Alien tissue used to repair his own, alien protein fed to keep the body alive, alien blood given to replace what he'd lost.

 _You don't want this,_ he thought, when they looked enviously on the impact dents and watched the carbon fiber heal itself, when the Vortigaunt serums made his wounds scar over in minutes, not hours.

\--

He watched from the window, pressed to the inner wall, presenting a difficult target. Snipers nested in the abandoned apartments across the street. He heard the whir-click of their energy round chambering, the soft scrape of a barrel stand on cement, the muffled _tat_ of the little deadly bullet punching into blacktop. Thirty-seven windows. Two snipers? Three? He listened, ears straining for data.

Whir-click. _Thwap._ A muffled grunt from the squad behind him, as they watched a rebel die in the street. He held up his fist for silence. The snipers hadn’t seen them yet, or they’d be filling the window frame with bullets.

Slow reload, deadly fire. Even he couldn’t take more than one sniper round. He knew what they felt like. His thigh ached from the metal still buried there; he’d carried that sniper bullet since Black Mesa. But Combine snipers’ rounds went all the way through. He had a set of matching scars now on his chest and back, entry to exit. The HEV had slowed it enough to keep the tissue damage fairly controlled. He’d bled into his chest cavity, collapsed a lung, come closer to dying that day than he had in a long time.

So he listened.

The rebel across from him, a black man with a revolver and a medic patch painted in brown oxidized blood, held up two fingers.

Freeman shook his head. Three fingers.

One in the second window up from the street, above the green dumpster. One in the middle of the white-fronted apartment, fourth window down from the top, third in from the left.

One more. Last shooter. He watched red laser-light dance across the blacktop. A cheap crutch, and the end point of a vector from the barrel. The street was a three-dimensional figure in his head, every visual shadow mapped by angle the laser couldn’t hit. The first shooter was bold, wasting ammunition on pigeons. The second shooter was precise; that one had shot the rebel.

The third shooter was careful. Wasn’t making a show of himself, wasn’t doing target practice. That one was waiting, very patiently, for their primary target to make a mistake.

Freeman narrowed it down to what the other two couldn’t cover. He had a blank spot on his mental map, a triangle of shadow their lasers couldn’t reach. The third man would be above that area, watching over it like a hawk watching for mice.

Freeman would have one chance to kill him. One grenade, a perfect arc into the right window. No second tries. He scanned the broken glass, watching for a glint of reflection, straining for movement-

“Hey that looks bad!” Loud in his ear, something cold and metal on his neck, a stab—

He slammed the crowbar up, tearing through cloth and flesh. Weight on his back, dead weight pinning him on the windowsill. Vulnerable, bad angle, exposed—Two shots into the body over him, he felt their muffled impact, and then they were both down on the apartment floor, out of the sightline. Safe. He had his back in the corner, bloody crowbar in hand. A dead man, a strange medic, lay sprawled between him and the window. He’d ripped the man open from thigh to sternum; the two snipers’ bullets a redundancy.

Not his medic. Not the man looking at him over the body, still holding his silence. His medic signed _sorry_ and crawled around the window’s sightline to Freeman’s position. “Not one of ours,” he whispered. “Don’t know where he popped up from. I didn't see him either until he was right on you. But here,” he offered a metal syringe and pointed to where blood was seeping through the knee joint again. His own blood, not the stranger's blood running off his shoulder.

He’d taken a bad stab from a venom spider a few hours back. Venom had dissipated but the cut was deep and didn’t want to close, even with the carbon fiber tight around his leg. The syringe held a useful cocktail of homemade painkiller and clotting agent, antidote to the venom’s anticoagulants. He accepted it and stabbed through the joint between armor plates.

The medics knew. The rebels knew. _Everyone_ knew better than to come up fast on him like that, much less touch him.

He did his own doctoring, and if he couldn’t, they took him to the Vorts. The dead medic wasn’t from their encampment. Must have been from another band, or gotten lost and hoped to join up. Hadn’t gotten the memo yet.

He gave his other two squad members an assessing glance. They were quiet, a little gray around the edges, but they knew too.

No one touches Freeman.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Also set during the City 17 battle of HL2:Ch 10. Urban warfare ain't quick. Luckily, they have an Emotional Support D0G.

“How’s today?” Barney asked. He had his usual half-grin half-smirk, but his eyes sought her face with veiled concern. He was good at hiding his tension in his posture, shoulders crooked, hips set casually against her workbench.

“Doing alright I think,” she said aloud. _Not great,_ she signed close to her chest. She nodded towards the closed washroom door.

“Glad to hear it,” Barney replied, and blinked a confirmation of her silent message. Everyone had learned a few signs recently, enough to understand Freeman, and sometimes enough to talk around him. He had annoyingly keen ears.

His routine was simple enough. Come in through the safe zone, hose off the HEV, de-suit, then shower and report to medical. If Alyx was lucky, she got ahold of the crowbar in the process and locked it up with the shotgun. On bad days it went to the medical suite with him.

The Vorts understood. They’d quietly tease him about it, ask him if it needed a bandaid too. One would gently pry it out of his hands and it’d be passed along back to her for safe-keeping. The Vorts, for all their telepathy, either didn’t understand or just didn’t care about the frigid aura that kept most humans at bay. That was alright with her; he needed some contact with other living beings.

He hadn’t lashed out at anyone, off the battlefield. He kept to himself, stayed well clear of the more boisterous members of the resistance. They’d thought he was arrogant, at first, then the stories went around of how close he’d come to killing a few of them.

And then he had killed someone, the unknown medic.

Friendly fire in an active firefight was one thing. Eviscerating an ally was another thing entirely. And that had ended all social overtures. He could lead, could write up a battle like a laboratory procedure and march them all through it with shocking efficiency, and all those men and women trusted him with their lives and futures without a second thought, but no one wanted to share a room or a table with the guy.

Alyx heard him finish in the washroom and prodded Barney out the HEV locker room door. Freeman did better with some alone time to decompress and reorient before being forced to interact on human terms. Under battle stress, he shot his way through. Under social stress, he turned into a cardboard cutout of himself.

“What’s not good?” Barney asked, once they were far enough through the cinderblock labyrinth to be out of earshot.

Alyx sighed. “More of the same. No eye contact today. He’s maintaining a grey zone from arrival through to medical. That’s what I want to work on. If I can get him to acknowledge that we’re both in the room and the HEV is coming off, and yeah it’s awkward and smelly but that’s ok, I think it might make the transition easier.”

“He’s holding too sharp a line, you think?”

“Yeah. Forcing the shift from big-guy-with-a-gun to small-guy-in-a-lab-coat. I wish I could get him a few days off to be just in the lab coat, no HEV and no missions. You know last week, when he had those two days off, he actually petted D0G?”

“Ha, we get this war to adhere to a forty-hour work week and you might have your wish. We could petition the Combine to call a ceasefire over the holidays. You mentioned that about the petting in the personnel report.”

 _Maintenance log_ , she thought. Not report. She felt like a personnel report was too invasive, but tracking machine performance was easy and useful. And she was still hopeful they could repeat that little breakthrough. She often sent D0G to sit with him and keep him company when she and Barney were busy. He’d stopped going up to the labs when other people were there. She didn’t know if he was shy, unsure of himself in someone else’s workplace, or afraid he’d get startled and break something. Or someone. But when the labs were empty, usually around 2 AM to 5 AM, he tended to find his way in. D0G went with him.

And she had video footage to prove on one of those quiet nights he’d sat on the floor and petted D0G’s metal head for the whole three hours. She hadn’t showed it to Barney yet; it still felt too private, but she’d noted “petted D0G” in the maintenance log. And she’d upgraded D0G’s affection coding to add additional “happy noises,” with a feedback reward if he could get Freeman to replicate the activity.

Freeman had reached out, very literally, and chosen to interact with something that wasn’t an enemy or a weapon. That was progress, in her book.

\---

He stared at the grimy water circling the drain between his toes. Warm water, warm-ish. A small solar array on the roof kept the system going. The washroom had been a mop closet, converted out of convenience into a cleaning station for both himself and the HEV. A shower head had been installed at nose height over the mop drain, no more than a few pipes bolted to the brown utilitarian wall tiles.

The base had been an elementary school, once, very long ago, and its sprawl of low-ceilinged cement and aggregate had endured civilization’s fall rather well. If it could survive a few hundred 13-year-olds, it could survive a few decades of war, it seemed.

He’d rinsed off the HEV outside, with an external hose from the rooftop rain barrel and a rough-bristled scrub brush. He could reach enough of it to get the worst blood and gunk off. On really bad days he signed for help from his squad and let himself be hosed down from a distance. He didn’t want Alyx encountering caustic venom spider innards with her bare hands when she did maintenance and repair.

Inside, dripping and shivering, he’d shuck the amour plating with her assistance. He could have dropped it from a helicopter and not damaged it, but it didn’t seem respectful to just heap it on the floor for her to collect later. They’d worked out a system for removing it in sequence and placing the pieces one by one back in the locker or aside for repair.

It was a relief to get it off, but a concentration challenge too. His skin was overly sensitive to changes in temperature or texture, all that data indicating a potential suit breach, biological attack or parasite, and the process of getting the suit off sent a lot of mixed signals. He had to keep himself completely under control, visually tracking her hands at work to counteract the body’s fight-or-flight response. Reflex movement saved his life in the city and freed up the conscious mind to focus elsewhere but was detrimental to his allies at the base.

Then the suit was off and the black carbon skin peeled away and he could retreat into the tiny ugly mop closet to rinse off the sweat, blood and detritus accumulated during the workday. The soap was, horrifically, the same cheap lavender-scented stuff they’d used at Black Mesa. Apparently elementary schools had purchased in bulk from the same suppliers.

She left clothing for him in the mop closet. Generic items, whatever they could scavenge or patch together, well-used and somewhat laundered. And a lab coat. Why, he didn’t know, but putting on the thin white material did make him feel a little less like an indestructible blunt object and a little more like the person he'd been once. And it had big pockets where he could hide his hands when they shook or put his glasses when visual data became too much data or store snacks snagged from the common supply.

Today he’d managed to get rid of the crowbar.

Sometimes it came with him, unconsciously gripped. It lived in his off-hand, opposite the gun, at the ready for close-quarters combat with puppets, parasites and optimistic CPs. His fingers felt light and empty without it, his brain told him he’d forgotten something important.

The Vorts understood. They’d gently take it away when he reported for medical. One even offered to put a bandaid on a particularly deep gouge in the steel. He’d smiled at that. He liked Vorts because they understood even if he forgot facial expression scripts.

He dressed and made his way down to the medical rooms, set up deep in the basement behind layers of fortification. Wounded soldiers healed faster when they knew they were safe and the Vort doctors were too valuable to be lost in a breach.

Today had been long, rough, lots of work for no real measurable gain; two blocks cleared, another one lost to an ant-lion nest, but the fighting had been light, comparatively speaking, and he had no significant injuries. The Vort medic gave him a mix of thick viscous fluids to drink and sent him out to find food. The fluids, a Vort trade-secret serum, were a long-term fix for some of his Black Mesa souvenirs. There was internal inflammation around the speed-grown scar tissue, made worse by concussive bruising from bullets the suit stopped. Since he couldn’t not get shot at, they’d opted for a slower road of gradual healthy tissue regeneration whenever his body could afford the calories for repair. Or at least that was the idea, and it came bundled with a Vort equivalent of a morphine dose, enough to keep him from having trouble in the middle of the night. He didn't like that without it he lost full control of the body, but he understood the biological mechanisms at play; when they had time, when he had the breathing space to just _stop_ for a week or two, he'd solve that problem. It was a long way off.

He took his allotment of edible objects from the man in charge of stock room and retreated to the tiny internal courtyard beside what had once been the elementary school library. Its books were long gone into ash, rot or other survivors’ personal stashes and the courtyard was clogged with brush and leaves, but it was open air and a square of bright sky where he could sit and breathe without feeling exposed.

D0G found him there. The construct wiggled through the brush and curled up beside him, thoroughly filling the courtyard’s scant empty space. He knew Alyx sent it to him but he didn’t blame her. D0G didn’t ask for a predictable human response, it just sat there and spun its gears, whirring softly in an approximation of breath. Its ocular array followed birds overhead, tracking movement. If there was danger, it would alert him.

Later, when the day shift was long asleep and the night shift out on patrol, he’d go the lab they’d set up in the old chemistry classroom and spend few hours looking through the notes others had made during the day. He annotated them sometimes, if he found errors or had something to add, but mostly he worked through dormant vocabulary and sketched out mental procedures for nonexistent materials analysis based on their work.

The aggregate cement bench was cold, hard and damp with half-rotted leaves but he stretched out on it anyway, his off-hand on D0G’s plated shoulder. The sensation of cold metal quieted his instinctual reach for the crowbar.

At his touch, D0G purred.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm working on wrapping up Crowbar but had a thought about sign language in HL2 context. I only tangentially interact with the deaf community in person, so you are welcome to critique the way I describe sign language and linguistic development/drift here.
> 
> Also I know I have some timeline issues here, I'll figure out what my story timeline is when I decide if I'm taking this seriously or not.

Barney started talking ten yards back from the door. He kept his voice calm and casual, letting the drawl slip in and slur his words together.

"--And wouldn't you know it, here's Franks sitting in the closet on a box of Doritos, munching away. Didn't even know we were lookin for him. He thought he'd died and gone to heaven just about, finding a stash like that. So Dan threw a fit, and that guy can holler. If there'd been a headcrab in a hundred miles it'd of come running, if not for us then for those Doritos. Man I don't know what they put in those things but twenty years past their expiration date they tasted just as good. Dan, he packed up a dozen bags and brought them back, made us all swear not to tell Marty but here we all come into the garage and Marty marches right up and says he can smell 'em on our breath. Thought he was gonna have a heart attack right there if we didn't turn them over! So yes, there's a couple bags of Doritos in the common stash for... oh about another two seconds, maybe?"

The anecdote got him through the door and into the room. He said goodbye to his imaginary audience in the hall and crossed the maze of counters and crates to where Freeman stood over an array of notebooks.

Freeman didn't turn around. He held up one hand and signed “ _I'm working_ ” over his shoulder.

"I know," Barney said. "I won't bother you." He set a ceramic bowl on the countertop. "And I know you aren't supposed to eat in a laboratory but you missed dinner. The big push is tomorrow, Freeman. Don't fight your stomach and the Combine. Also because of tomorrow the kitchen folks did good. It's rice from that stash we found and actual fresh meat. I don't know what animal and I'm not asking but it doesn't taste at all like headcrab. I had to wrestle Jefferson's entire squad to get this for you. Don't let all my hard work go to waste!"

Freeman sighed. He flipped three notebooks closed and signed “ _Thank you, good night._ ”

"Yes, it is a good night," Barny said dryly. "It's two in the morning, I really want to be in bed, we're rolling out at nine am because first light is overrated when your enemy's an alien, and you, sir, doctor, the great orange savior, old buddy, are not permitted to starve yourself insensible or pull a pre-finals all-nighter. I don't know what you have in those books there but tomorrow's plans are done and logged and set in as stone as they get. And yes no plan survives contact with a headcrab but Freeman, please, for my sake, eat your dinner and go to bed. Or I will ask Eli to wake up Alyx to send D0G to come haul your scrawny butt out of here and back to the dorms and sit on you until tomorrow."

The hand came up again. “ _You're Bothering._ ”

"Yeah I know, I lied. I'm here to bother you."

Freeman turned around and fixed him with a _why_ glare.

Barney smirked at him. "Because I'm going to need you to save my life tomorrow and that won't happen if you keel over from hunger." He handed Freeman the bowl of rice and stew. He still didn't have all of Freeman's personal boundaries mapped out- both the ones Freeman tried to establish a mile out from himself and the (much smaller) ones he actually needed. Barney had a decade of experience bullying humanity back into men and women who tried to let themselves callous over, but Freeman was a tough case and he knew if he pushed too hard Freeman would just walk away, undoing all his progress. Even being in the laboratory with him was a step forward. When they'd first started the City 17 push, Freeman had still been locking laboratory door.

If it was unlocked, it was intentionally unlocked. A gap in the outermost boundary, left open at two in the morning.

Freeman leaned against the counter, unconsciously mirroring Barney's posture. More progress. He was eating, slowly, small bites. Good. Both his hands were busy though, which made conversation difficult. Barney stopped talking to respect his inability to reply.

But then Freeman pointed at him with the fork and made a _keep going_ gesture with it, so he mentally shrugged and kept going. "We had a plan, you know. Before you came back. But you've let us speed up the clock. Not many others have waltzed through Combine prisons and come back out again alive. This push... it was going to be another one year, two, five... but we've done more in four weeks than in the last four years. And yeah, it's thanks to you, but also to Alyx and Eli and the rest of them. We get the Citadel off-line, down that suppression field... it'll give the people something to work with." He chuckled. "They'll be awful busy soon as that field goes down, at least."

 _That_ earned him a quick narrow warning glance from under those busy dark brows. But if Freeman didn't want to joke about suppression fields, that was fine with him. "Why are you awake right now anyway?"

Freeman stabbed his fork into the rice and signed “ _Jet lag. Slow teleport._ ”

Barney laughed. He was watching Freeman's face, or he would have missed it- the softening around the eyes, the quick look up again, the mouth that went from compressed to relaxed. Oh. Freeman was laughing too. A man who never spoke with his mouth wasn't going to smile with it either.

How much had he missed, just looking for the wrong thing? How much lost in translation between a man who did not speak out loud and one who couldn't seem to stop making noise? "Good one," he said. "What are you working on? If you don't mind my asking?"

Freeman made a complicated series of quick one-handed gestures, then gave up half-way and waved them out. He handed Barney a notebook from the stack on the bench and went back to eating.

Its pages were filled with multicolored writing. He recognized Alyx's happy scrawl of purple ink, Kleiner's neat, tight cursive in green, Eli's plain black printing, and orange ink-who'd thought of that, he wondered-for Freeman's notes. Freeman wrote in the margins, or just a few lines, though once, he filled two pages in response to Kleiner’s suggestion that teleportation would overtake the need for personal vehicles. Most of the language went over Barney's head but he gathered they were trying to solve the problem of Combine-derived biofuels in pre-Combine Earth engines. The substance was just different enough from diesel or biodiesel to kill an engine in a year or two, but it was more accessible than traditional diesel, with enormous stockpiles laid up by the Combine in most city centers. Fossil fuels were off the table completely; gasoline refinement had been offline for twenty years and what was stored wasn't usable for car engines anymore. If they wanted to resurrect a modicum of human civilization, transport and communication, they needed a fuel source and engine design that wouldn't destroy their few irreplaceable working vehicles.

Barney shook his head and handed the notebook back. Most of the Resistance hadn't thought beyond tomorrow, and here was a handful of scientists pouring their lives into assumption they’d win.

Freeman handed him another notebook and signed “ _You know this?_.”

It wasn't a lab notebook, just a pad of paper heavy with ink, its pages smudged and dirty from being passed around and thumbed through. The pages were full of diagrams, crude sketches of a human hand, over and over, showing motions and positions. A dictionary of sign language developed during the last two decades, compiled by the many Resistance members who for myriad reasons needed to communicate without making noise. Of course. He felt like an idiot. There hadn't been a sign for _headcrab_ when Freeman was at Black Mesa. Now, there were six of them, specific to each known variant. Same with the other Xen species, Combine enemies and other new-world specifics. There were old signs too, modified into one-handed signs performed against the shoulder or chest. Battlefield signs, because the other hand held a gun. He'd been reading Freeman's one-handed sign language but never stopped to consider that Freeman had learned it after returning. He wouldn't have known military sign or the Resistance-specific language what, six weeks ago, when he first got plunked back into reality.

He'd been busy, all those nights holed up here in the chemistry lab.

"Yeah, I know most of it," Barney admitted. "We use it out there." He motioned with his chin past the walls, to the outside world in general. They all used it outside, but only the scattering of nonverbal soldiers used it inside the walls, when the majority were only too happy to speak freely, to laugh or cry out loud. "I'm sorry, Freeman. I didn't even think. If course you'd need to know it too. I should have brought this to you when you first arrived."

Freeman waved away his comments. “ _You didn't know I didn't know._ ”

"I didn't stop to think, man." Ouch. That one hurt. Freeman was giving him a lot of grace. Again, he just hadn't considered Freeman's point of view. Freeman's disinclination towards social interaction shouldn't have stopped him from making sure the guy had a way to communicate off the battlefield, a base fluency in a shared language.

Freeman handed Barney the empty dish. “ _Thanks for dinner. Tasted terrible._ ”

He knew what to look for this time, and caught that glimmer of humor.

“ _Don’t wake up Alyx, I’ll be done soon._ ”

“Good. See you tomorrow at the war.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> World's worst idea ever for curing hair-trigger reflexes. 
> 
> I know I say these are nonsense but this one is considerably more nonsense than usual.

Calhoun was minding his own business in the corner, with his own little charcoal pot keeping his feet warm while he cleaned his Overwatch rifle. The weapon was reliable, powerful, heavy as a brick and stupidly overdesigned with a million little parts that needed constant oiling and cleaning. So he had it disassembled on a pillow case so he wouldn’t lose all the little sprocket bits, a bottle of precious gun oil in one hand and a wad of cotton in the other, when he heard Freeman’s name from the next fire over. 

“He’s a lose cannon and he’ll shoot you soon as the enemy.” 

“No he won’t.” 

“You saw what he did.” 

“Yeah man, I was there. Don’t ask me about it though. I don’t blame him. That medic came up outta nowhere. I’d have clocked him too.” 

“Freeman didn’t ‘clock’ him by what I heard.” 

“Yeah he did, he just happened to have a crowbar in his hand.” 

“Guy wound up with his guts all over the HEV, what Louis said.” 

“Forget what Louis said. Freeman was within his rights, I told you. No one sneaks up on folks out here! Not when you’re tryin to get a bead on a sniper that’s got you pinned!” 

“He’s too jumpy. I don’t like working with him.” 

“Then don’t. He’s one guy. He’s got the four of us and Calhoun and he doesn’t need idiots like you who still wet themselves at spider crabs.” 

“You’re not afraid it’ll be you someday?” 

“No. Why would I? I don’t _sneak up on a trained killer_. I have brains, moron.” 

“He ain’t a ‘trained killer.’ He’s a pencil-pusher in a tank suit.” 

“Who is very, very good at killing.” 

“He’s a time bomb.” 

“So’re you. You stabbed a stuffed animal thinking it was a headcrab.” 

“At least I didn’t stab the idiot who threw it at me!” 

Laughter. 

“Shut up.” 

More laughter. “You should have seen your face!” 

“Alright if you’re so brave, throw it at your precious Freeman next time.” 

“Naw, I ain’t scared of him but I’m not suicidal either.” 

Footsteps. Someone else joined them. “Louis, you telling stories about Freeman now? Because Frank says you’re telling stories about Freeman.” 

“No. I told stories about an idiot medic though.” 

“See? Two to one, the guy’s harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, long as it didn’t sneak up on him.” 

“You know what that man needs?” Louis’s voice. “He needs a good sacking out.” 

“A what.” 

“Sacking out. You know, what you do with a jumpy horse. Snub ‘em to a post, sack ‘em out. Get the spook out of ‘em. They figure out the world ain’t out to eat ‘em and they settle down.” 

“Louis, my friend, the world _is_ out to eat ‘em.” 

“I said he needs it, not that he’s gonna get it. And I ain’t goin after him with a lariat.” 

“Hey, we get this done, I’ll give you a hundred bucks to try.” 'This' being, of course, the unspoken goal of human freedom and world peace.

“You don’t got a hundred bucks.” 

“I got a whole lot more than that! I been saving it up! What do you think I have to spend it on out here, huh? Listen. Hundred bucks.” 

“HEV or no HEV?” 

“Ha, your ‘sacking’ ain’t gonna be much good in the HEV now would it.” 

“Hey, where’s Alyx, let’s get her in on this. She’d pay double.” Frank’s voice. 

“No, she’d bet against us.” 

“Uh huh.” 

The conversation went on, around and around, and by the end of it the wager was up to five hundred in favor of seeing Freeman get roped and eight hundred on Freeman beating the stuffing out of whoever tried it. Someone had told Alyx, and she smacked Louis upside the head for suggesting the stupid idea, then added four loaded automatic clips and a pearl-handled antique revolver she’d found somewhere to the pot. 

Calhoun looked up from his gun-cleaning to see movement in the shadows across from him. A slate-grey boot hung over the cinder block wall, eight feet up. Freeman was sitting on the edge, crowbar across his lap. The firelight caught his glasses, turning them opaque glowing orange. 

And now that he knew what to look for, Calhoun saw the smirk, the tiniest twitch of a smile under his whiskers. He tapped dismantled gun barrel to get Freeman’s attention, then tossed him a little short boot knife, the kind that came eminently in handy when someone else showed up with a rawhide rope. 

Then he went off to place a bet. Let the soldiers have their moment of midnight manic hilarity- most of them wouldn't live through the Citadel climb. But if they did, if somehow they all did, and after the world was at peace, someone showed up with a rope to make good on it, well, Calhoun would sell popcorn.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freeman gets a chance to breathe; little bit of homesickness and a little bit of culture-shock in equal measure start to catch up with him. 
> 
> impulse-written, impulse-posted

“And you, doc? One for you too?” 

Gordon looked at the man behind the table, down at the box, and took a paper-wrapped package of dried apple slices. He didn’t want dried apple slices, sour and tasteless with a foam-like consistency and skin that stuck between his teeth, but the six people currently assigned to procuring and distributing food had worked hard on them and the other several dozen militia and noncombatant base staff had seemed pleased to have them. 

Small, hard sour crab-apples, a hardy sport-type grown wild and self-seeded in the poor soil and cold forests, dried on a stove top and wrapped in the pages of an old encyclopedia. What he wanted was the taste of an apple grocery-store fresh, waxy-skinned and worm-free. 

He took the apple slices and his portion of the cooked vegetable-grain mix, and retreated to White Forest’s periphery. Someone said it was February, to explain the general damp and darkness of the northern forest, but he couldn’t imagine the base and woods in any other season. Were there still seasons? Would summer bring clear sky and warm sun? Or would the heavy smoky overcast continue indefinitely, until humanity forgot what else was up there? 

The bowl of hot food was cooling rapidly. Early spring night had set in. 

“Hey,” Alyx, behind him. Of course she knew his preferred rooftop. He didn’t hide the mild annoyance, and she didn’t hide her sense of self-righteous assurance that she was exactly where she wanted to be. He handed her his packet of apple slices. She broke them into bits, tossed a piece in the air and caught it in her mouth. “Not to your taste?” she asked. 

He shook his head. 

“What would be better?” 

That was not a yes-or-no question. He chewed on the tough boiled grain to delay his answer. He could leave the question unanswered, just ignore her or walk away and find some other place. He’d done that before, plenty of times, but it didn’t make the nights pass any faster or soothe the rough ache that drove him to places like this. 

The other residents of White Forest gloried in these slow, dark cold days, as the fractured Combine withdrew from hostile woods and left the research station to patch its wounds and rebuild. But Freeman would have preferred a continued battle, or at least an impending research deadline or another satellite to launch or _something_ to pit himself against, no more of this empty waiting and chewing on stale ill-cooked foodstuff, and at night only dreams of blood and cold void. 

He would rather be in the void, back on the shelf, than left to dread it, he thought, but that would not be better than dried apples. 

He signed _“Coffee.”_

Alyx grinned. “Still have never tasted the real thing. Every time someone finds instant or even really old beans, there’s almost a fight for it. My dad traded a complete set of Doyle books for twelve ounces of instant coffee last year. Said it tasted like the best tin can he’d ever drank.” 

Freeman made a face at the comparison. Coffee, correct coffee, bore no resemblance to tin-can-flavor but he couldn’t explain that to her. He couldn’t describe what freshly-roasted freshly-ground coffee smelled like, or how the precise weight of press and coarseness of grind influenced flavor, or how that flavor differed depending on how long it sat or how it was poured, and not to mention milk. He had the vocabulary and knew the signs for it all but she wasn’t going to close her eyes and _smell_ it by memory, the way he could. 

Milk. Another thing he missed. Dairy products of any kind were nigh unheard-of in the Cities or outlying areas. There’d been rumors of remote hamlets with their cattle and goats hidden in the hills but who knew if they’d survived the influx of alien predators. Without the Combine to centralize population, and by extension food for the scavengers, in the Cities, the predator pressure on rural survivors would increase. 

They’d done the right thing, closing the tear, scattering the Combine and breaking its chokehold on humanity, and they’d do the right thing again when they mapped the Borealis and teased out its significance to their planet and their war. And he’d do it all over, a hundred times, if he could only wake in a world he knew and understood. 

Alyx ran out of apple bits to catch. “We find coffee, I’ll bring you some,” she promised. “But in return, if you find molasses, you bring it to me. Deal?” 

He signed a question mark. What on earth did she want with molasses. 

“Alright, so hear me out. Molasses, my dad said, you mix it with sugar and get brown sugar, right? And then if you mix brown sugar with margarine you get caramel. And then if you mix caramel with corn you get caramel corn, and that’s supposed to be delicious. We have sugar,” she ticked off on her fingers, “And Crisco, and a bag of corn, and the procedure notes with the temperature threshold from a book-“ 

_“-Recipe,”_ he signed. _“It’s not a lab procedure, it’s called a recipe when it’s for food.”_

“Oh. Yeah. We have the recipe and all the equipment and stuff, but we haven’t gotten molasses in a while. So. You find some,” she lightly smacked his knee, “and I’ll find you coffee, and then we’ll make it and see if it’s good as they say it is.” 

He finished the grain-vegetable stuff, gone cold and congealed, and set the bowl down. Caramel corn wasn’t exactly on his list of most-missed foods and he couldn’t explain to her that when they made it with twenty-year-old tinned Russian Crisco and corn not meant for popping it wasn’t going to taste anything like the bagged store-bought stuff people remembered and missed. 

That’s what he didn’t like. Things looked correct, sometimes, or even smelled correct, or his brain just filled in sensory gaps with stored memories, and he’d anticipate something familiar. But it never, ever was. 

_One year,_ he thought. One year in a new place before things smoothed out, stopped feeling intrusive and a little hostile in their unfamiliarity. His first year at Black Mesa hadn’t been simple. His first year in grad school, much less so. One year here? If he were permitted that much, if he wasn’t thrown out of time again, life would be easier. He’d have developed a new baseline for what things ought to taste and feel like, calloused over the old wants as the rest of the population had. 

No one else missed coffee quite the same way anymore; no one else had last tasted fresh, good real coffee only months ago. The plants were extinct, succumbed to a Combine pathogen released to knock down humanity’s food stability. The engineered plant pathogens had taken a lot of common food cultivars, and while there were probably immune wild-type shrubs growing in remote areas in the right latitude, it would be decades before coffee was exported world-wide as it once had been. 

Decades before he tasted it again. 

Alyx was looking at him; he didn’t need to see her face to read the pity there. Entanglement might give them both an edge in battle but he could have done without this shared inside knowledge. 

He’d saved the world but not yet for himself. Coffee, and bacon that came from pigs and not headcrabs, and a pillow stuffed with real down and not chopped foam insulation, and tap water that didn’t run orange with rust. A bed that wasn’t a military cot, a sky with colored sunsets and clothing washed in scentless detergent. That’s what he wanted more than dried apple slices. He tried to put those memories, the wants, in a box on a shelf and close the door on them but they kept leaking through. 

The bite of bitter dried apple when his tongue anticipated citric acid and cinnamon. 

“Hey, you alright?” she asked. 

He appreciated the courtesy in her question and shoved down his guilt. She didn’t have to be sitting on a dark cold rooftop with him and she certainly wasn’t up here for the view. He made a motion for both yes and no. Honest, for once. Not like she couldn’t feel the answer through their link, but signing it out between them meant something. 

“Yeah,” she said. She looked away, out over the black evergreens. “Me too.” 

Distant sky glow might have been fires, might have been other encampments or surviving Cities; he made a mental note to look at a map. So much of this world was still so foreign. 

One year. One full circuit around the sun, all the ragged burned-out seasons in their turn. _You hear that,_ he thought, as if the thing in the man-skin could hear him, _one year. Give me one year. Let me make the world mine again._


End file.
